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A Very Good Receipt for Making Gingerbread

A gingerbread dough made with flour, sugar, treacle, butter, lemon peels, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, candied orange, pearl ash, and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

A Very Good Receipt for Making Gingerbread

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the dough

  1. Melt the butter with the treacle over low heat.

  2. In a large bowl, combine the flour, lemon peels, ginger, cloves, nutmeg, and candied orange.

  3. Mix in the warm treacle and butter, then add the dissolved pearl ash and brandy.

  4. Let the mixture sit overnight.

Shape and bake

  1. Shape the dough as desired and bake.

  2. For brandy snaps, add small pieces of candied orange to each snap.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Lemon + gingertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  4. Ginger + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,324 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Lemon + nutmegtop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together11,318 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Treacle (molasses)
Provides sweetness, dark colour and moisture, and helps the gingerbread stay soft.
All-purpose flour
Forms the structure of the dough once it is mixed and baked.
Butter
Adds fat for tenderness and richness in the finished dough.
Pearl ash
Releases gas that helps the dough rise and lighten as it bakes.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, sugar, molasses, butter, ginger, clove, nutmeg):

  1. Raisinfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, sugar, molasses, butter, ginger, clove, nutmeg. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More gingerbread recipes

Soft 197Cake 72Nuts 68Molasses 52Pudding 38Cookies 36 See all 364 →

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